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No, Final Fantasy XIII Doesn't Suddenly Have Lesser Visuals

When a game is in development for an extended period of time, and we only see samples of official media at sporadic moments, things can get a little confusing.

Take, for example, the recent dust-up concerning a supposed downgrade for the visuals in Final Fantasy XIII. It was this article that caused a definite stir amongst the gaming public; it compares a couple sets of screenshots in what was supposed to be a "before and after" examination. This really got everyone talking, and the PlayStation 3 faithful immediately sprang up and said, "blame the 360 for this!" Well, you should all calm down; we knew there was something fishy about this when viewing the pics, but we couldn't quite put our finger on it.

Thankfully, a poster over at the GameTrailers forums seems to have provided us with the answer: in all actuality, the "new" screenshots aren't new at all. They only seem new because they were just recently released to the public on DVD. But in fact, they were shown behind closed doors at last year's Tokyo Game Show, which was almost a year ago. Since then, we've seen more up-to-date media, and it has all been more impressive. So don't worry yourselves about some sort of graphical "downgrade;" FFXIII still looks gorgeous, and that's that.

No, I doubt it will be picked on forever. Many people were, justifiably IMO, upset that SE both changed their mind over exclusivity AND failed to provides any games at all for their biggest fans who'd bought PS3s on the strength of their word-but, in fairness that's old news and we all move on.

Thing is, and it doesn't matter what anyone esp SE say the game WON'T look as good as a multi plat as it would have as an exclusive(and that goes for if it had gone to 360 exclusively too)-it's just a fact that no multi plats have got near the performance of PS3 exclusives this generation.

To me it's just logical that the mminute they announced it was going multi we could all give up on it challenging the better looking exclusives on PS3 in the looks dept.

Whatever, it'll look fine and it isn't worth all the fuss but to deny it won't be a slightly less good looking game as a multi is plain fallacy as it won't be quite as sharp and I doubt there's any way it could be when a multi has to deal with the weaknesses of both consoles and isn't optimised for either. Unlike, you huessed it, an exclusive can be.

Trust me SE's main aim is now going to be getting the game as good as they can while remaining as identical as possible over the two sysytems which isn't the same thing as they began with, is it?

So we shouldn't cry about it but nor should we kid ourselves that this is the same project it started life as because it plainly isn't going to be -regardless of any screenshots we won't ever know how it would've looked as a PS3 only game(or 360 only).

actually Microsoft has some new compression software that really reduces HD video size as well as textures... you can see this with the new update installs saving in some cases a couple of gigs from the actual size of the original game... I read that it took the one game from over 3 gigs to 750mb. Good compression can do alot... or they can forsake that retarded FMV/CG crap and keep everything in engine

in the new beta NXE, yes the install size drop. but it have nothing to do with FMV compression and HD video compression.its still being discussed on the scene what microsoft do with the new installation method.

some people suspect that in the new install method, microsoft not copy the padding to HDD. thats why games got smaller install size.

as for FMV on FF13, DF speculating that on the Xbox 360 all the cutscenes are in-game. and the PS3 will get pre-rendered cutscenes.but both will still have HD FMVs.

ohhh man.. ohh man. im so pumped up for this game. Btw. I GOT PAST THE SERPENT IN FFVII! YEY FOR ME! LOL.. im at disc 2 last part in midgar. FF7 is such owwwnnnaagggeeeee... I hope Nobuo Uematsu makes the tunes for ffxIII cause if not! ima be so pissed!!!

it isn't that hard to beat the snake on ur first time through. i did it al the ply throughs iv done all u really need to do it buy the best equipment before u get to him and make sure u have one person always healing.

i feel exactly the same way on this, I am so pissed about SE's business practices since the merge, but at the same time, I am still buying every single JRPG made by them this gen (IU, LR, SO4 etc) , and am dying to see FF13, v13, 14, Dissidia, Agito etc.Last edited by BigBoss4ever on 8/5/2009 1:19:11 AM

The PS3 version better be superior. I'm going to be angry if this turns out mediocre, dull and shripped due to the xbox's limitation. For once this should be our superior multiplatform. After all. The PS3 version should be using "close to a 100% of the PS3's power". Or so they say. Tools.

thats the problem, it will be pretty much identical and nobody outside SE will EVER know if anything got crapped down to make it that way. They will insist up and down that nothing was cut or diminished.

dident SE say that the ps3 version was half completed before they even started working on the 360 version?if one games half done i cant see them going back and redoing all there work just to have both working the same.they would leave it as it is, and do they 360 copy if it looks worse so be it, it should they stole it from us.god dam M$ and their bottomless checkbook.its a shame US does not have laws about buying out the competition like europe does.now wonder they got sued twice in europe for trying to buy everything.

Eeh. I'm glad the US doesn't have laws like that. Government intrusion hurts the market. Seems to me SquareEnix should have said no or Sony should have done more to hold on to it. Either way. I can't wait for the game. Jut hope it's not dumbed like RE5. Apparently the PS3 version sported lower res textures. Crapcom claims it's the anti-aliasing. Lame.

Well, that's the thing, AA is where the PS3's GPU doesn't shine. But, what many developers forget is that you can attain the same types of effects that AA gives, without actually utilizing AA. And that's where Capcom and most 3rd's go wrong. They rely on what's been tried/true on PC/360 and expect it to work on the PS3. There are games on the PS3 that don't place an emphasis on AA, but look absolutely fantastic.

Devs just need to understand that there're other options out there than the same old techniques. The PS3's a perfect platform to expirement on, in that regard, as it doesn't handle FSAA very well.

the game was built on a multiplatform engine so it would never be able to reach the same level as KZ2... that's just the way things work... getting it workon the 360 in 3 months should show you that it's not some inferior machine

Well I don't care about any of this Bla Bla Bullsh**! I JUST WANT THE GAME....

And Fair enough we all know and agree that it would have been so much better if it was an PS3 exclusive. Right? Okay so unfortunately they made it multi platform which all in all was a business decision and they are going to coin it.

Okay so let us all suck up our tears and wait for the game to actually get released so we can at least play it, then when FFXIIIversus comes out as an exclusive then we can compare the two and then state our case there and then.

I for one just want the game regardless of it being multiplat or not....

those pics in that article are CGI pics there not IN GAME pics there pre rendered just like what GG did with the KZ2 E3 demo.i cant see games getting hair and lighting looking that good for some time to come.look at here blade the way the light reflects off made me shat my pants.

This is the problem with blogging "reporters." It is okay to take a comment from a poster at Gametrailers and report on it as if it were news.

I'm sorry, but I am not going to take some poster's opinion over at GT as fact and neither should any of you, especially since most of the posters over at that site are fanboys.

This is why serious journalists will always look down on bloggers and game "journalists"... because neither use the age-old journalism credo of verify, verify, verify, otherwise known as getting multiple sources to confirm a story.